Эд Макбейн - Happy New Year, Herbie and other stories

“I... I don’t know what to do,” she said. “I’ve never done this before.”

“No?” he said, and there was a trace of sarcasm in his voice.

“No. Could... could we talk a little?”

“What about?”

“I don’t know. Anything.” The room grew silent. Patiently, Randolph waited.

“I’m... I’m sorry the place isn’t nicer,” the girl said.

“It’ll do.”

“I meant—” She shrugged.

“What?”

“I don’t know. A girl likes to think—” She stopped, shrugging again. “Would you like a beer or something? I think we have some cold in the Frigidaire.”

“No, thanks,” Randolph said. He grinned. “We’re not allowed to drink on duty.”

The girl missed his humour. She nodded and then sat opposite him at the table. Silence crowded the room again.

“Have you been a cop long?” the girl asked.

“Eight years.”

“It must be terrible. I mean, being a cop in this neighbourhood. ‘

For a moment, Randolph was surprised. He looked at the girl curiously and said, “What do you mean?”

“All the... all the dirt here,” she said.

“It...” He paused, studying her. “You get used to it.”

“I’ll never get used to it,” she said.

She seemed about to cry. For a panicky instant, he wanted to bolt from the room. He sat undecided at the table, and then he heard himself saying, “This isn’t so bad. This is a nice apartment.”

“You don’t really mean that,” she said.

“No,” he answered honestly. “I don’t.”

The girl seemed to want to tell him about the apartment. Words were perched on the edge of her tongue, torrents of words, it seemed, but when she spoke she only said, “I haven’t got my own room.”

“That’s all right,” he said. “We can use...” And then he stopped his tongue because he sensed the girl had meant something entirely different, and the sudden insight surprised him and frightened him a little.

“Where do you live?” she asked.

“In a hotel,” he said.

“That must be nice.”

He wanted to say, “No, it’s very lonely.” Instead, he said, “Yeah, it’s all right.”

“I’ve never been to a hotel. Do people wait on you?”

“This is an apartment hotel. It’s a little different.”

“Oh.”

She sat at the table, and he watched her, and suddenly she was trembling.

“What’s the matter?” he asked.

“I’m scared,” she said.

“Why?”

“Because of... of what I almost did. What I almost became.”

“What do you mean?”

“I’m glad you arrested me,” she said. “I’m glad I got caught the first time, I don’t want to be—”

She began crying. Randolph watched her, and he felt inordinately big, sitting across from her, awkwardly immense,”

“Look,” he said, “what do you want to bawl for?”

“I... I can’t help it.”

“Well, cut it out!” he said harshly.

“I’m sorry.” She turned and took a dish towel from the sink, daubed at her eyes with it. “I’m sorry. Let’s... let’s do it.”

“Is this really your first time?” he asked suspiciously.

“Yes.”

“What made you... well... I don’t understand.”

“I got tired,” she said. “I got so damned tired. I don’t want to fight any more.”

“Fight what?”

“Fight getting dirty. I’m tired of fighting.” She sighed wearily and held out her hand. “Come,” she said.

She stood stock-still, her hand extended, her shoulders back.

“Come,” she repeated.

There was a strength in the rigidity of her body and the erectness of her head. In the narrow stillness of her thin body, there was a strength and he recognized the strength because he had once possessed it. He rose, puzzled, and he reached out for her hand, and he knew that if he took her hand, if he allowed this girl to lead him into the other room, he would destroy her as surely as he had once destroyed himself. He knew this, and somehow it was very important to him that she be saved, that somewhere in the prison of the precinct, somewhere in this giant, dim, dank prison there should be someone who was not a prisoner. And he knew with sudden painful clarity why there were potted plants on the barred fire escapes of the tenements.

He pulled back his hand.

“Keep it,” he said harshly, swiftly.

“What?”

“Keep it,” he said, and he knew she misunderstood what he was asking her to keep, but he did not explain. He turned and walked from the room, and down the steps past the stacked garbage cans in the hallway and then out into the street.

He walked briskly in the afternoon sunshine. He saw the pushers and the pimps and the prostitutes and the junkies and the fences and the drunks and the muggers.

And when he got back to the precinct, he nodded perfunctorily at the desk sergeant and then climbed the stairs to the Detective Division.

Gene Fields met him just inside the slatted rail divider. Their eyes met, locked.

“How’d you make out?” Fields asked.

Unwaveringly, unhesitatingly, Randolph replied, “Fine. The best I’ve ever had,” and Fields turned away when he added, “Any coffee brewing in the Clerical Office?”

Sam Epman was a short man with a bald head and a mustache that looked as if it were experimental and impermanent. The transitory appearance of the mustache was perhaps caused by two coinciding phenomena, one completely natural, the other induced by the fine hand of Epman himself.

On nature’s side the otherwise black mustache was liberally sprinkled with gray which, rather than giving it that highly touted “distinguished” look, simply created an impression of sparseness, of unhairy patches scattered throughout the black. Left to its own devices, nature might have triumphed over the odd coloration, but it was here that Epman entered the picture. Unaware of the optical illusion, Epman unwittingly added to the natural effect by keeping the broad mustache trimmed very close to his lip. The total effect was something less than rewarding. You could assume that Epman had rubbed a grimy finger under his nose, or you could in equal error assume he’d begun growing the unsightly lip piece only the day before yesterday.

To make matters worse, Epman constantly called the mustache to the attention of anyone who happened to be in its vicinity. In the middle of a conversation his fingers would reach up suddenly and spasmodically to smooth a mustache that needed no smoothing whatever. Thumb would stroke one end of the short-bristled smear, forefinger frantically working on the other end. Sam Epman became a colonel of Indian cavalry, briskly stroking, smoothing, caressing a nonexistent handle-bar mustache. The hand would move fitfully in a downward motion as if desperately trying to control this wild hairy growth, as if anxious to merge mustache with mouth.

At four o’clock that afternoon, with the rain having dwindled to a slow, steady drizzle, with the Roman sun feebly attempting to poke its way through the persistent overhang, Sam Epman stood before the long window in his suite and briskly stroked his mustache as he introduced me to Peter Wainwright. A sunless glare limned Epman’s body so that his face remained a blur from which radiated only the blinking reflection of the pinky diamond on his left hand.

“I’m always surprised when two top writers don’t know each other,” he said, smiling, the stroking hand suddenly dropping to his vest where one thumb automatically hooked itself into a pocket. “Any other business, the top people in it usually know each other, if not intimately at least to say hello to. You manufacture cap pistols — don’t it stand to reason you should know the competition? Even Gimbels knows Macy’s. So what is it with writing and writers?”